Don't like someone? Burn his house down!

Several anti-gay arsons have occurred in recent days. Mike Tidmus has the info.

Capping an alarming trend this past month, a fourth anti-gay fire has destroyed the home of a young gay couple in Lakeland, Florida. On 25 July, Paul Day and Christopher Robertson returned from running errands to find their home in flames and “Die Fag” scrawled on their front steps.

The couple had frequently been the victim of anti-gay verbal abuse since moving to the area, and Paul Day claims their mailbox had been riddled with shotgun pellets when they lived another part of the county.

Police investigators reported that the fire had multiple points of origin. Day adds that it appeared a flammable substance had been poured on the carpet.

In an article on the arson attack in The Orlando Sentinel, local gay activist Patrick Jones suggests that those with anti-gay attitudes are more apt to push boundaries than they used to be.

No doubt because of the anti-gay rhetoric of the right. Does the Bible(TM) tell people to burn down people's houses?

Proof the right can't back up its rhetoric

STEPHANOPOULOS: Let's talk about something else in the book, radical feminists. A second quote from the book, you say, Respect for stay-at-home mothers has been poisoned by a toxic combination of the village elders' war on the traditional family and radical feminism's mysogynistic crusade to make working outside the home the only marker of social value and self-respect.

Let's get specific here. Name one or two of these radical feminists who are on this crusade.

SANTORUM: Well, I mean, you know, you have you go back to, what's her name, well, Gloria Steinem, but I'm trying to remember- I can't remember the woman's name. It's terrible. Anyway.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But it's kind of an important point. Because you paint this broad brush: radical feminists, village elders. Name one.

SANTORUM: There's lots of- no, there's lot's of- well, Gloria Steinem. There's one. I mean, there's lots of writings out there...

Yet he can't name them.

From Think Progress

Turkey wants US troops to solve its Kurd "problem"

Turkey urges US to strike rebels

Turkey has repeated calls for US forces to take direct action to stop Kurdish rebels, the PKK, using bases in Iraq to launch attacks against Turkey.

"Frankly speaking, we do not see the efforts by the US that we expect to see. We have expressed our views to that effect to the Americans." -Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkish Prime Minister

Where are we supposed to get the troops for this? Obviously ours are worn out.

Of course, the Iraq war has given Turkey an excuse to wipe out the Kurds under the guise of terrorism. It wouldn't be the first time they've tried.

Notorious Terrorist Organization Calls It Quits

The IRA has formally ordered an end to its armed campaign and says it will pursue exclusively peaceful means.

In a long-awaited statement, the republican organisation said it would follow a democratic path ending more than 30 years of violence.

The IRA made its decision after an internal debate prompted by Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams' call to pursue its goals exclusively through politics.

Proving that compromise IS possible. The IRA's shameless acts of cowardly terrorism have destroyed any legacy the IRA as a freedom fighting organization had. Most people in this country don't know the history of the IRA as a legitimate rebel group who finally gained independence for most of Ireland from the British in 1921. Notice I say "most", because the Brits decided to keep a fourth of the island for themselves, which caused the mess in the first place. Well, I mean the IRA becoming a terrorist group mess, not the Britain-ruled-Ireland-for-800-Years mess.

All of this just because the Irish wouldn't send soldiers for the Crusades! Because of this, the Pope, who was English, became angry and sent English troops to take over Ireland for awhile, you know, to try to get them to behave and listen to the Vatican. Only, the Reformation happened before sovereignty was returned to the Emerald Isle, and the English king, no longer obliged to listen to the Pope, decided he'd keep it for England.

Those Brits have caused so much trouble for this world. Too bad the Israelis won't take a lesson from the Irish.

Sphere of Influence, Part II

Mugabe signs aid deal with China

Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe has signed a deal with his Chinese counterpart Hu Jintao in Beijing.

The details have not been made public but China was expected to seek mineral and other trade concessions in exchange for economic help.

Zimbabwe needs hard currency to repay loans or face expulsion from the IMF. There are shortages of fuel and food.

Mr Mugabe has adopted a "Look East" policy, after being ostracised in the west over alleged human rights abuses.

China has promised to help Zimbabwe and to not interfere in "internal affairs".

Riiiiight.

Mr Mugabe's six-day visit [to China] demonstrates Beijing's growing involvement in the continent.

It also shows China's determination to welcome an old ally, regardless of Mr Mugabe's pariah status in the West, the BBC's Quentin Sommerville in Shanghai says.

The ties between China and Mr Mugabe date back to the 1970s war of independence, when fighters from his Zanu party were armed by the Chinese.

I think I've read this story before...

But the war wasn't for oil!

WOLFOWITZ IN HIS OWN WORDS

Choice comments by the presumptive World Bank President compiled by Jim Vallette, Research Director, Sustainable Energy and Economy Network, Institute for Policy Studies

IRAQ AND OIL

“The fabulous -- and they are fabulous -- oil resources of Iraq are probably greater ultimately than Saudi Arabia , will be ultimately in the control of a Government of Free Iraq. I believe you will find the French and the Russians beating down the door to find those people, and to curry favor with them for the future.”

House National Security Committee testimony , September 16, 1998

Saddam Hussein’s “main supporters in the Security Council, France and Russia, I think could be expected to follow their commercial noses when they saw -- forgive the mixed metaphors -- which way the oil wind was blowing.”

House National Security Committee testimony , September 16, 1998

“If these efforts fail to bring an agreement from Saddam Hussein, then we escalate by striking the infrastructure to include roads, bridges, forts, and other choke points, the electrical grid, their oil refining capability – (and) then start taking out their oil wells...”

House National Security Committee testimony , September 16, 1998

Iraq has “got already, I believe, on the order of $15 billion to $20 billion a year in oil exports, which can finally -- might finally be turned to a good use instead of building Saddam's palaces. It has one of the most valuable undeveloped sources of natural resources in the world. And let me emphasize, if we liberate Iraq those resources will belong to the Iraqi people, that they will be able to develop them and borrow against them.”

Testimony to the U.S. House Budget Committee Feb. 27, 2003

“The oil revenues of that country could bring between $50 and $100 billion over the course of the next two or three years. Now, there are a lot of claims on that money, but… We are dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction and relatively soon.”

Testimony to the U.S. House Appropriations Committee , March 27, 2003

“I would say that on the whole, things are happening in some respects faster than we expected. One of the most important ones is that we were able to get substantial control over the southern oil fields before Saddam Hussein was able to create the kind of environmental disaster that he was planning to do.”

Press briefing , March 28, 2003

“One of the keys to getting Iraq up and running as a country is to restore its primary source of revenue: its oil infrastructure. The resolution [1483] envisions the resumption of oil exports, and provides that revenues be deposited in the Development Fund for Iraq , with transparency provided by independent auditors and an international advisory board. Decisions regarding the long-term development of Iraq 's oil resources and its economy will be the responsibility of a stable Iraqi government. The United States is dedicated to ensuring that Iraq 's oil resources remain under Iraqi control. Iraq 's resources--including all of its oil--belong to all of Iraq 's people.”

Congressional testimony , May 22, 2003

“It is necessary for the protection of the essential security interests of the United States to limit competition for the prime contracts of these procurements to companies from the United States , Iraq , Coalition partners and force contributing nations. Thus, it is clearly in the public interest to limit prime contracts to companies from these countries.”

Order issued December 5, 2003

“The guidance states that the defense of Middle Eastern oil fields ‘ranks above South America and Africa in terms of global wartime priorities.’”

Draft “Defense Planning Guidance,” as cited in The Washington Post , Feb. 13, 1990

“Ultimately, the most important economic measure will be to make provision for the oil resources of liberated areas to be made available to support the resistance to Saddam Hussein.”

U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee testimony, March 25, 1998

Something Happened Between "I Love You" and the Click of the Phone

Excellent column by Fisk about the Occident verses the Orient

Something Happened Between "I Love You" and the Click of the Phone Palestine, Afghanistan and Iraq Turn It Incendiary

By ROBERT FISK

That fine French historian of the 1914-18 world conflict, Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, suggested not long ago that the West was the inheritor of a type of warfare of very great violence. "Then, after 1945," he wrote, "... the West externalised it, in Korea, in Algeria, in Vietnam, in Iraq... we stopped thinking about the experience of war and we do not understand its return (to us) in different forms like that of terrorism... We do not want to admit that there is now occurring a different type of confrontation..."

He might have added that politicians - and here I'm referring to Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara - would deliberately refuse to acknowledge this. We are fighting evil. Nothing to do with the occupation of Palestinian land, the occupation of Afghanistan, the occupation of Iraq, the torture at Abu Ghraib and Bagram and Guantanamo. Oh no, indeed. "An evil ideology", a nebulous, unspecified, dark force. That's the problem.

There are two things wrong with this. The first is that once you start talking about "evil", you are talking about religion. Good and evil, God and the Devil. The London suicide bombers were Muslims (or thought they were) so the entire Muslim community in Britain must stand to attention and - as Muslims - condemn them. We "Christians" were not required to do that because we are not Muslims - nor were we required as "Christians" to condemn the Christian Serb slaughter of 8,000 Muslims at Srebrenica just over 10 years ago. All we had to do was say sorry for doing nothing at the time. But Muslims, because they are Muslims, must ritually condemn something they had nothing to do with.

But that, I suspect, is the point. Deep down, I wonder if we do not think that their religion does have something to do with all this, that Islam is a backward religion, un-renaissanced, potentially violent. It's not true, but our heritage of orientalism suggests otherwise.

It's weird the way we both despise and envy the "other". Many of those early orientalists showed both disgust and fascination with the East. They loathed the punishments and the pashas, but they rather liked the women; they were obsessed with harems. Westerners found the idea of having more than one wife quite appealing. Similarly, I rather think there are aspects of our Western "decadence" which are of interest to Muslims, even if they ritually condemn them.

I was very struck some years ago when the son of a Lebanese friend of mine went off to study for three years at a university in the south of England. When I passed through London from Beirut, I would sometimes bring audio tapes or letters from his parents - these were the glorious days before the internet - and the student would usually meet me in a pub in Bloomsbury. He would invariably turn up with a girl and would drink several beers before setting off to her flat for the night. Then in his last term at college, he called home and asked his mother to find him a bride. The days of fun and games were over. He wanted Mummy to find him a virgin to marry.

I thought about this a lot at the time. He was - and is - a most respectful, honourable man who has passed up much wealthier job opportunities abroad to teach college kids in Beirut. But had he been a weaker man, I can imagine he might have quite a few problems with his life. What was he doing in Britain? Why was he enjoying himself like "us", only to turn his back on that enjoyment for a more conservative life?

Take another example - though the two men have nothing in common - that of Ziad Jarrah. He lived in Germany with a Turkish girlfriend - not just dating but living with her - and then on 11 September 2001, he called up the girl to say "I love you". What's wrong, the young woman asked. "I love you," he said simply again and hung up the phone. And then he went off to board an airliner and slash the throats of its passengers and fly it into the ground in Pennsylvania. What happened in his brain as he heard the voice of the girlfriend he said he loved? His father, whom I know quite well, was as stunned as the parents of the London suicide bombers. To this day, he still cannot believe what Ziad Jarrah did. He is even waiting for him to come home.

It's not difficult to be cynical about the way in which Arabs can both hate the West and love it. In Arab capitals, I can read the anti-Bush fury expressed in the pages of local newspapers and then drive past the American embassy where sometimes hundreds of Arabs are standing round the walls in the hope of acquiring visas to the US. The Koran is a document of inestimable value. So is a green card.

But from the many letters I receive from Muslims, especially in Britain, I think I can understand some of the anger generated among them. They come, many of them, from countries of great repression and from lands where the strictest family and religious rules govern their lives. You know the rest.

So in Britain - and even the Muslims who were born in the country often grow up in traditional families - there can be a fierce dichotomy between their lives and that of the society around them. The freedoms of Britain - social as well as political - can be very attractive. Knowing that its elected government sends its soldiers to invade Iraq and kill quite a lot of Muslims at the same time might turn the "dichotomy" into something far more dangerous.

Here is a land - Britain - in which you could live a good life. Pretty girls to go out with (note, we are talking about men), or marry or just live with. Movies to watch - no snipping of the nude scenes in our films - and, if you like, a beer or two at the local. These things are haram, of course, wrong, but enjoyable, part of "our" life. Most British Muslim men I know don't actually drink alcohol and they behave honourably to women of every religion (so please, no angry letters). Others enjoy our freedoms with complete ease.

But those who cannot, those who have enjoyed our freedoms but feel guilty for doing so - who can be appalled by the pleasure they have taken in "our" society but equally appalled by the way in which they themselves feel corrupted (especially after a trip to Pakistan for a dose of old-fashioned ritualised religion) have a special problem.

Palestine or Afghanistan or Iraq turn it incendiary. They want both to break out of this world and to express their moral fury and political impotence as they do so. They want, I think, to destroy themselves for their own feelings of guilt and others for the crime of "corrupting" them. Even if that means murdering a few co-religionists and dozens of other innocents. So on go the backpacks - whoever supplied them is a different matter - and off go the bombs. Something happens, something that takes only a second, between saying "I love you" and then hanging up the phone.

Robert Fisk is a reporter for The Independent and author of Pity the Nation. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch's collection, The Politics of Anti-Semitism. Fisk's new book, The Conquest of the Middle East, will be released this fall.

From Killing Fields to Baseball Fields

A new pastime in Cambodia

Thanks to a wandering expatriate, the "Killing Fields" of Cambodia are being replaced by baseball fields. And thanks to the good folks at Major League Baseball International, sandlots are replacing the specter of Pol Pot, a dictator who once ruled over all that murder and mayhem.

Baseball, heretofore an aberration in the once war-torn Southeast Asian land, is a budding institution.

"Nobody in Cambodia ever heard of baseball," said Joe Cook, the expatriate who escaped to the United States as a child and as an adult ultimately brought the grand game to his native country. "They didn't know it existed."

Cook was 12 years old in 1984 when his family fled a country ravaged by the Khmer Rouge, which tried by force to institute an egalitarian Communist peasant society after the war in Vietnam and Cambodia ended. From 1975-79, two million people died of overwork, exhaustion or execution -- nearly 25 percent of the total population.

Baseball has magical healing powers. I wouldn't be surprised to see this sport take off like it has in Japan and Korea.

Random bits of psychosis

Someone out there in the Netherlands thinks that Saad Hariri is the antichrist, because whomever it was found my site through this.

Tony "Psycho" Perkins says gays are to blame for the labor breakup.

Non-white tourists arrested for no reason in NY.

And Scott McClellan's meaningless response to Air America's first White House briefing question.

A Final Solution to poverty stricken communities

A UN investigation yesterday denounced Robert Mugabe's slum clearance operation, which has left hundreds of thousands of people homeless, as a "catastrophe" that violated international law.

The UN's 98-page report concluded that 2.4 million people had been affected, of whom 700,000 had lost their homes or livelihoods or both, in a humanitarian crisis of "immense proportions".

It called for an immediate halt to any further demolitions and for Zimbabwe to allow unhindered access to the international and humanitarian community to provide assistance.

I guess they're supposed to get the bootstraps out? So now these people who had nothing to begin with have less than nothing now? Not even a home to go to? Why hasn't this been in the MSM?

I guess Israel's policies are catching on. What's next, razing homes for economic development in the US? Oh, wait, the Court already ruled that's ok.

I want to hear a condemnation from Washington, but wouldn't that be hypocritical. (I guess that's never stopped us before.)